The Truth and Other Lies Read Free

out a jammed key over the gas flame. Martha’s manuscript was lying wrapped up under the bed again. She sat down at table and devoured the fried eggs.
    He suggested they live together and she said nothing, which he took for a yes.
    They spent the entire day together. She told him how he had carried on the night before, declaring that he was insignificant in every way. Henry agreed with this, but could no longer remember anything.
    In the afternoon they ate ice cream and sauntered through the botanical garden, where Henry told her a bit more about his past. He spoke of his childhood, which had ended with his mother walking out and his father falling down the stairs. He didn’t mention the years he’d spent in hiding.
    Martha didn’t interrupt him once, nor did she ask any questions. She held his arm tight as they walked through the tropical hothouse, and at some point she laid her head on his shoulder. Until that day Henry had never told anyone so much about himself, and most of what he said was actually true. He left out nothing important, didn’t gloss over anything, and made almost none of it up. It was a happy afternoon in the botanical garden, the first of many happy afternoons with Martha.
    The next night too they slept in Martha’s bed near the stove. He was tender and sober this time, gentle and almost shy. And she was completely silent, her breath hot and quick. Later, when he was fast asleep, Martha got up and sat down at the typewriter in the kitchen. Henry was woken by the clatter of the keys. Steady, with short breaks, a period. Then the ringing of the little bell at the end of the line. Period, new line, period, paragraph. A high-pitched rasping sound as she pulled the typed paper out of the typewriter, and several short rasping sounds as she put in the new sheet. So that’s how literature is born, he thought. The clatter went on all night until morning.
    The next thing Henry did was to mend the bed. Then he got hold of a rubber mat for the typewriter to stand on, procured two new kitchen chairs, and bored open the electricity meter to save on heating costs. While he was getting all that done, he reflected on the possibilities of creating a home without any capital and wondered to what extent he was cut out for it.
    He tidied and cleaned. Martha didn’t comment on his domestic activities. She didn’t ever comment on anything; Henry admired that. He didn’t, however, have the feeling that she was indifferent or devoid of opinion—no, she was quite simply content and could find no fault with him. It was as if she had foreseen everything.
    It struck Henry that Martha never read her stories herself. She never talked about them; she wasn’t proud of them. When she finished one, she started on the next, like a tree shedding its leaves in the autumn. The story must have taken shape in her mind even as she was working on the previous one, for there was no pause for inspiration. For a long time it remained unclear to Henry what she lived off. She had studied, but did not reveal what. She must have had some savings, but only rarely went to the bank. If there was nothing to eat, she ate nothing. In the afternoon she regularly left the apartment to go swimming at the municipal pool. Henry followed her once; she really did just go swimming.
    In the cellar Henry found a suitcase filled with rotting manuscripts, hastily buried like children’s corpses beneath moldy rat droppings. The pages had clumped together into a pulp; only the odd phrase was still legible. Lost stories. The manuscript of Frank Ellis would have rotted too, or have been turned into a brief blast of heat in the stove on a cold day, if Henry hadn’t hidden it. He was to thank for that. As he would later tell his conscience, even if he hadn’t created Frank Ellis , he had at least rescued it. That had to count for something.
    “I’m not interested in literature,” Martha said on the subject. “I just want to write.” Henry made a mental note